


Your eyes look like coming home

by sarahcakes613



Category: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - All Media Types, Trouble in the Heights (2011)
Genre: Adoption, Domestic Fluff, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Parenthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 16:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29067564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/pseuds/sarahcakes613
Summary: Nevada can see that Caractacus misses having kids in the house, and when an opportunity arises, he starts to think maybe there's a way he can change that, even if it forces him to face some feelings he'd rather not contemplate.
Relationships: Caractacus Potts/Nevada Ramirez
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13
Collections: Valentine's Day 2021 exchange





	Your eyes look like coming home

**Author's Note:**

> Maria asked for Nevactacus adopting a baby boy. It was definitely a challenge, and I hope you like what I came up with!

_November_

Caractacus sighs. Again. He’s been doing it periodically over the last hour, sitting in front of his laptop with a slight frown on his face.

Nevada looks over at him. “Everything okay?” He asks, all too willing to take a break from looking at the report his accountant has given him. If he had a head for numbers, he wouldn’t need a goddamn accountant.

“Hm? Oh, yes, everything’s fine dear,” Caractacus answers distractedly. He finally closes his laptop and moves from the table over to the couch where Nevada’s sitting.

“It’s only, I’ve had an email from Jemima,” he wrings his hands. “She’s decided to stay on campus for Thanksgiving.”

Nevada frowns at him. “Why?”

“Something about a time-sensitive project and lab access, I’m not too sure. She says she’s very sorry and she’ll see us at Christmas.”

He looks utterly dejected, and Nevada knows why. They’ve already had a similar email from Jeremy, who had written to say he’d been offered an extremely rare opportunity to do a placement at a top-tiered restaurant over the Thanksgiving weekend and would they mind terribly if he didn’t come home for the weekend?

“So it’ll just be us, then.” Nevada states.

“Mm,” Caractacus agrees, his hum low and tilting down sadly at the end.

“We don’t gotta, you know.” Nevada tosses his papers down on the coffee table and turns to face his boyfriend. “It’s not your holiday, and I don’t care if we have turkey or any of that shit.”

“Oh, Nev, no, of course we do.” Caractacus looks scandalized. “It’ll be fine, it’s just, they come home so rarely as it is. I just have to get used to it, I suppose. After all, they were never going to stay children forever!” He says it brightly, but his eyes are shining and Nevada can tell it’s a thought that saddens him.

* * *

_January_

Nevada and Caractacus stand on the porch, watching as Jeremy’s taxi pulls away.

“Well, that’s it, then.” Caractacus sighs. “Between Jeremy’s placements and Jemima’s new lab position, we shan’t be seeing them now until at least the summer.”

Nevada thinks about making an off-colour joke about how frustrating it had been to keep his voice down in the bedroom these past two weeks, especially after getting used to the months of just the two of them. Somehow, he doesn’t think that’s what Caractacus needs to hear right now.

“Come on,” he urges him inside. “You should be proud of them, going off into the world like that. You gave them that, you and their mom.”

“And you,” Caractacus squeezes his hand. “I may have given them the ideas, but you gave them the fearlessness. You’re a good father, Nevada.”

He shrugs awkwardly. “It helps they were already half-grown when I got them,” he says.

“Oh I don’t know about that,” Caractacus says with his sweet smile. “You like to think you’re all scary and tough, but you forget, I’ve seen you play peekaboo with babies in the check-out line.”

“Lies,” Nevada says. “Whatever you saw was probably just me scratching my face.”

“Mhm,” Caractacus says. “If you say so, dear.”

As the days yawn on, Caractacus seems to grow more and more woeful, unable to fill his days enough to distract him from missing his children. Their next-door neighbour runs a small at-home nursery, and Nevada catches Caractacus watching the toddlers run around the backyard. Every so often he lets out a small wistful sigh.

Photo albums start appearing on the kitchen table, the twin\s early years rendered faithfully in glossy colour. Caractacus has a story for each photograph, and even as he pretends to listen, Nevada begins to sit uncomfortably with an idea that swirls in his head, a way he could possibly offer comfort to the man he loves.

* * *

_March_

Aurelia shifts nervously from foot to foot, teetering a bit on her 8” heels.

“Sit down,” Nevada waves at the chair in front of his desk and perches gingerly on the edge of her seat.

“So, what the fuck’s so important you gotta come all the way to me?” He asks, because his girls know that the floor manager’s their first stop, and for Aurelia to bypass him entirely and knock on Nevada’s door means it must be something big.

“I’m pregnant,” she blurts out.

He stares at her. “So?”

“So, I don’t know, I thought maybe you should know. Not like I can keep prancing around on these much longer.”

“Wait, you’re keeping it?” He doesn’t mean to sound surprised, but he is, a little. The girls know his rules. You get pregnant and don’t want it, great, see Edgar and he’ll get you to the doctor on payroll. You want to keep it, fine, see Edgar and he’ll call one of their suppliers, see about getting you a sitting down job in a warehouse somewhere. Aurelia just never struck him as the motherly type.

“No,” she admits, her arms curling around her stomach. “I mean, I don’t know, I don’t want a kid but…” she crosses herself and he nods, understanding. It never fails to amuse him how devout some of his employees are, considering who they work for.

“I need to take a few months off, is all. I just figured maybe I dance til I start to show and then come back after.” She shrugs, but Nevada can tell she’s anxious about how he’ll react.

He leans back in his chair. “I’m not gonna tell you what to do,” he says. “You fuck off in a few months, I won’t go looking. You come back, I’ll put you to work.”

He scrawls a number down on a post-it and pushes it towards her. “I got a cousin who works for one of those places, whatsit, they take the babies and find them homes.”

She nods, taking the post-it and tucking it into her bra, and then stands up to leave.

“Aurelia,” Nevada says, and she turns back at the door. He shakes his head. “Never mind.”

He’d been about to say something before thinking better of it, but the idea is stuck in his head now and he decides to go home early. Edgar can manage things without him for a few hours.

When he gets home it’s past midnight but Caractacus is awake, he can see the light shining under the door of his workroom. He knocks on it, having learned his lesson the time he opened without knocking and wound up with a face full of extinguisher foam.

“Come in,” he hears, and he pushes the door open.

“You’re home early, love.” Caractacus says, and then looks up, his eyes appearing startled and owl-like behind his goggles. “Or have I lost track of time again?”

“Nah, I left work early. There was a thing.”

Caractacus lifts off the goggles and sets them down next to his project, which currently just looks like a pile of gears.

“What sort of thing?”

He moves a stack of books off a chair and sits down. “One of my girls is pregnant, and she’s going to have the baby, but she don’t want it after.”

Caractacus’s eyes go soft. “That’s not an easy choice for her to make.”

“You remember what you said after Christmas?” Nevada says, seemingly changing the subject.

Caractacus blinks. “You’re going to need to be more specific.”

“’Bout me being a good father.” He’s staring at his feet, not looking at his boyfriend.

“Oh, yes?” He poses it as a question, unsure why Nevada’s mentioning it.

“Got me thinking, is all.” Nevada says. “Now that I got experience, maybe I’d be okay at it even if they were babies.”

Caractacus shuffles his chair closer to Nevada’s and puts a hand on his knee. “What’s happening in that head of yours?”

Nevada shrugs. “I know you miss having kids around. You ever think about doing it again?”

He sits back in surprise. “I can’t say I’ve thought about it. I’m not exactly a spring chicken these days.”

“ _Chiflado_ , you’re only 42, a lotta guys are older than you when they have their first kid.” Nevada snorts.

Caractacus opens his mouth, closes it without speaking. Opens it again. “I suppose some part of me is thinking I’ve done it all already and that chapter of my life is closed.”

Nevada’s heart sinks, but his boyfriend isn’t done talking.

“That being said, you’re right. I do miss it. I’m afraid I’m not terribly good at being an empty nester. But do you really think it’s something you want? I mean truly?”

Nevada shrugs again. “I been thinking about it some. Might be nice to have a little Nevada Junior running around. Someone who might want to take over the business some day. You’d be there, so it’s not like I’d have to figure it all out on my own, and I know you won’t let me fuck up a kid too bad.”

“Nevada,” Caractacus says softly, and he finally looks directly into his inventor’s sparkling green eyes. “I’d be honoured and lucky indeed to raise a child with you. I have the utmost faith in you, you have to know that.”

* * *

_June_

Things move fast after that. It’s amazing how smoothly things go when he throws money at them, but there’s still reams of paperwork from Nevada’s adoption specialist cousin, and his lawyer, things for him to sign and for Aurelia to sign, and all that is left to do now is wait.

He starts dreaming about the boy, that day on the bridge, so many years ago. The look of utter terror in the kid’s eyes, the way he’d cried and wet himself. He wakes up one night with a scream still on his lips.

A hand tentatively touches his shoulder and he whips around to see Caractacus also sitting up, looking carefully at him.

“Nevada, darling?” He asks cautiously.

“I’m fine.” Nevada says shortly. Caractacus bites his lip, not wanting to point out the obvious.

“Alright, fuck, I’m not fine,” he admits. He looks at Caractacus, wide-eyed. “I can’t do this. I shouldn’t be allowed to do this. How can you think I’d be good at this? I’m a fucking monster. I can’t be trusted, I’m going to screw this kid up like I screw everything up, and you’re finally going to realize what a waste of time I am and leave me like you should have done years ago.”

He pushes the blankets away as he rambles, jerkily trying to get out of bed so he can call his lawyer right now to reverse all the signatures, but a hand latches onto his wrist and grips tightly. Caractacus has a hidden strength in him from his years working on large machinery, and no matter how much Nevada shakes his arm, Caractacus doesn’t let go.

“ _Chiflado_ , let me go.” He glares at his boyfriend, who only glares back.

“Get back into bed right now, mister.” He says. He doesn’t sound angry, he sounds almost sad. Nevada slumps back down, the wind taken out of his sails.

“Nevada,” Caractacus forces his chin up to look him in the eye. “You are not a monster. You are an impatient, demanding, and sometimes very frustrating man, but you are not a monster. I daresay I am a fairly decent judge of character, and I trust you with my life. I trust you with my children’s lives. You are not, and you have never been, a waste of my time.”

Nevada’s lips press together as he listens, trying not to hear what his boyfriend is saying. It doesn’t work, the other man’s voice trickles into his ear like a soothing balm and he can feel himself unwinding, his nightmare-tense muscles unclenching as he sinks back into bed.

“‘Fuck, ‘m sorry, chiflado,” he mutters.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Caractacus says firmly, pushing Nevada and shuffling closer so he is spooning the other man.

Nevada frowns. “Why are you spooning me?”

“Because even big tough reformed gangsters sometimes need a cuddle. Now be a dear and go back to sleep.”

* * *

_August_

When Aurelia is still only 30 weeks pregnant, she goes into labour.

Caractacus meets him at the hospital, the silent question clear on his face.

“She’s fine, everything’s fine,” he says gruffly. “Doctor said it was probably high blood pressure that caused it.”

“And the baby?” Caractacus cranes his neck, trying to look into Aurelia’s room.

“It’s a boy. He’s got all his fingers and toes, doc said he scored a 10 on the apwhatever.”

“Apgar,” Caractacus says absently, and then his eyes focus on Nevada. “A boy?”

The door to the room opens and Nevada’s lawyer walks out holding the final paperwork, followed by a nurse holding something far more delicate and precious.

“Meet your son, dads.” The nurse tilts her arms so they can see the tiny creature all bundled up there. He’s wrinkly and pale brown, with a shock of black hair.

Up close, he looks impossibly small, far too fragile a thing to ever be entrusted to Nevada. He balks when the nurse moves to hand him the baby and Caractacus steps in, taking the infant with practiced ease.

“Hello beautiful boy,” Caractacus says, looking down lovingly at the baby in his arms.

“All that’s left before I can notarize is his name.” The lawyer looks at them. “Have you chosen one?”

Caractacus looks at Nevada and nods, smiling sweetly, before returning his attention to the baby, rocking his arms and bouncing lightly on his feet.

“Andrés,” Nevada says. Andrés, for the nephew he’d lost before the Potts family had tumbled into his life. It had been Caractacus’ idea for Nevada to choose the name. After all, he’d said, he’d already had the chance to name two.

“Andrés,” Caractacus croons, “welcome to the family.”

* * *

_December_

“Stop fussing!” Nevada shoos Caractacus away from the kitchen where he is getting dinner ready, a wooden spoon in one hand and Andrés asleep in the crook of his other arm.

“Just be careful!” Caractacus hovers, only stepping back when Nevada glowers at him.

“Go make yourself useful, _chiflado_ , set the table. They’ll be here soon.”

He knows Caractacus is nervous and hell, so is he. The twins are coming home once again for Christmas and they’re about to meet their baby brother in person for the first time. They’d been supportive, if a little confused at the whole process, but seeing the change to their family and home on a computer screen isn’t the same as coming face-to-face with it.

The warm bundle in his arm twitches and he looks down into the wide-open and ever-curious deep brown eyes of his baby boy.

“Nap time’s over, huh?” He asks, reaching carefully over to turn off the stove. He adjusts his hold on Andrés, propping him up so he can look over Nevada’s shoulder.

He still worries, just about every day, that he’s going to somehow completely screw this perfect child up. He wakes up in the night in cold sweats, remembering his nephew, the boy on the bridge, his old life, and he worries about that legacy. Caractacus is so good then, never waving his fears away like they’re worthless, but listening, and gently pointing out all the ways in which he has changed in the past near-decade.

He bounces Andrés gently. “It’s a good thing your daddy came into your papi’s life, hey?”

His son babbles in response, waving his chubby firsts in the air.

“Yeah,” Nevada murmurs. “My thoughts exactly.”


End file.
